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The lead characters in a scene from I Give It a Year (L-R) Simon Baker, Anna Faris, Rose Byrne and Rafe Spall

Ten minutes into conversation with Dan Mazer, the writer and director of the new British film comedy, I Give It a Year, I put my foot in it.

The film, which Mazer, 35, describes as an “anti rom-com”, begins with a disastrous wedding ceremony, followed by the creeping realisation that the bride and groom — buffoonish writer Josh (Rafe Spall) and ambitious advertising executive Nat (Rose Byrne) — are completely unsuited to one another. Instead of hoping that they get together, you spend the film rooting for them to divorce. As Mazer points out, splitting up is much funnier than getting together.

It’s an enjoyable subversion of the genre, as you’d expect from Sacha Baron Cohen’s old schoolfriend and the director of the Borat and Brüno films. The “rom” part lives up to the traditions of the producers, Working Title, too, allowing him to “have his cake and eat it”, as he puts it.

I did have one problem with it, though, I tell him. I couldn’t believe that Nat would ever marry an imbecile like Josh, an emotionally retarded beta male. I mean, what a loser! “Yeah, he is sort of, quite based on …” Mazer gives a little shimmy in his chair. “He is quite autobiographical, is Josh.”

Oh, that Josh! Sorry, I was talking about that dreadful fellow... Josh whatshisname. Oh, your Josh has a heart of gold.

“I’m perfectly prepared to acknowledge that I’m a dick and I am a beta male,” laughs Mazer. “You can go a long way on a bit of charm and being funny around a dinner table. But the reality of me is that I soon become incredibly annoying. I have a lot of comedy writer friends, and it’s a pretty universal phenomenon that their wives eventually stop finding them funny.”

In Mazer’s case, the withering looks come from a fellow comedian, Daisy Donovan — who should make a welcome return to our screens this summer. The pair met when they were both working on the anarchic satire, The 11 O’Clock Show, back in the late Nineties. They have now been married for seven years and have two daughters, Maisie and Minnie Ivy (no joke).

“People think we must have the most hilarious household — and to some extent we do,” he says. “Until it comes to the point that we’re both being so funny that everything collapses and it becomes a scene of torment and heartbreak.”

There’s a point in the film where Josh’s parents remark to him that the first year of marriage is the hardest — which, he says, was painfully true in his case. “But I think it’s better that way — each year has been better than the last. But it’s hard to make everything work, and it takes commitment.”

He was inspired to write the film after attending a succession of fancy weddings where it was apparent that no one had grasped this crucial idea. At one of them, the only endearing thing the groom could find in his wife was the way she would root for the car keys in her handbag — it was over in a year. “It’s rare to have to work for something these days,” he says. “People get it the wrong way around now: it’s all about the wedding and nothing about the marriage, which is an arse-about-face way of looking at things, really.”

This is precisely the sort of nonsense propagated by rom-coms such as 27 Dresses, which is why he bristles at the label. “It’s not reality — and reality is where everything that’s funny comes from. I mean, what would actually happen to the couple in, say, Leap Year once they got married? You think: ‘Hang on! You’re incredibly ill-suited to each other. You really haven’t thought this through, Amy Adams and Matthew Goode’.”

Mazer is clearly relishing his first solo project, after years as a sideman (albeit one with Golden Globes and Emmys to his name). “As a boy growing up in Ruislip, I didn’t imagine I could be a movie director,” he says. Still, his comedy lineage actually stretches back to his school days at Haberdashers’ Aske’s in Hertfordshire, where he was friends with Baron Cohen. “We still have essentially the same motivation that we had then, just to go around causing mischief. It’s taken us to this point, which seems remarkable and slightly unfair,” he reflects.

Mazer cut his teeth as a producer on The 11 O’Clock Show, which helped launch the careers of some of the biggest names in British comedy. Baron Cohen first debuted Ali G; Ricky Gervais used to play the faux-bigot, and Mackenzie Crook and Donovan were co-presenters with the “fifth Beatle”, Iain Lee (“Yeah, I’m not sure what he’s doing at the moment.”)

While it had its critics, the satire show possessed something that its worthy contemporary equivalent, 10 O’Clock Live sorely lacks: anarchy (remember the inexplicable campaign to get Nicky Campbell elected London mayor?).

“I think we’re going through a phase now when it’s all a bit cosier,” says Mazer. “You want Miranda, or Rev, or Michael McIntyre. When we were doing The 11 O’Clock Show in the late Nineties, it was boom time. It’s always a reaction to what’s going on in the world.”

At a recent 11 O’Clock Show reunion, the tone of the old episodes shocked him. “There were a lot of people who were too young being given free rein,” he says. “There were jokes about Harold Shipman as he was being convicted. On the day of Jill Dando’s death, we were making jokes about it. Reprehensible, really.”

Nowadays, this would surely be swiftly followed by public apologies, sackings and inquiries. Then, it was “an extraordinary opportunity to allow a generation to find their comic voices”, he says.

There were occasions when they pushed it too hard. A performer called Robert Popper (who went on to create the sitcom Friday Night Dinner) played a showbiz reporter whose sole comic purpose was to interview eminent people, and then get so nervous he would vomit on them. Channel 4 took rather a dim view when they gate-crashed its political awards ceremony to throw up on an unsuspecting Mikhail Gorbachev.

Mazer also helped to stage those early Ali G stunts. “Sacha would be in character the entire time. For me, the funniest bits were off-camera. You’d see him introduce himself to Tony Benn: ‘So how do we spell Tony? Is it T-O-N-E-E?’ You’d see these politicians thinking: ‘What on earth have I let myself in for?’”

Baron Cohen is rare among British TV comedians in his successful transfer to the big screen. “It’s always bemused me why that should be,” Mazer concedes. He suggests that one reason why British film comedies often fail is that instead of choosing British comedy actors, the producers insist on Hollywood stars with “nominal box- office appeal”, but who don’t know how to be funny. “It was always my intention to have as many funny people in the film as possible,” he says. “It was like playing Fantasy Football with actors.”

Fortunately, most of them said yes — and the most enjoyable aspect of I Give It a Year is the prominence it gives them. There’s Stephen Merchant as the idiotic best man; Alex MacQueen as a vicar; Olivia Colman as a stunningly insensitive marriage councillor, and Tim Key, a film-stealer as the couple’s awkward solicitor. “I’ve had American agents look at that Tim Key scene, and go ‘Who’s THAT guy? We gotta sign him up!’”

There is also the man who Mazer identifies as the next big thing in British comedy: Dustin Demri-Burns, who is part of the sketch duo, Cardinal Burns. “It's an interesting thing about the British comedy landscape. Every two years, something comes along that is ginormous. The Fast Show … Ali G … The Office … Little Britain … The Inbetweeners … and now we’re waiting for the next one. I think that will probably be Cardinal Burns.”

It’s worth paying attention to Mazer’s tips, I sense. The funniest person he knows, he says, is his best man, a TV producer named Chris Little. The speech at his wedding to Donovan had been given a light edit by the creators of The Inbetweeners.

“They persuaded him to put in all the terrible anecdotes that my wife had forbidden. As she realised where each anecdote was going, she gave him this death stare. He had to abort every story. The rabbi who did our wedding said to him it was one of the worst best man speeches he’d ever heard. But at least he’s still allowed to come around our house.”